Shelley: The Pursuit (123 page)

Apart from news of George IV’s forthcoming coronation, letters and papers from England brought one highly dramatic story: the Cato Street conspiracy. Thistlewood and his four fellow-conspirators had been arrested on 23 February, on the very eve of their plot to assassinate Lord Liverpool’s ministry in London. At the Casa Silva this provoked animated discussion for several days, the talk
turning to the fate of conspirators in general. Madame Mason told a story of the Irish conspirator Jackson who ‘swallowed a strong poison and expired in torture before his judges’ rather than endanger his fellow-prisoners by an escape attempt. Then she mentioned a particular kind of poison — her knowledge originating from Tatty — which was both deadly and painless. Claire recorded: ‘Talk with Madame M. of the Prussic Acid distilled from Laurel leaves which kills without pain in a few minutes.’
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Shelley listened to this with great interest, and put it at the back of his mind.

Shelley’s considered reaction to the Cato Street affair was anything but enthusiastic. He saw it as a victory for useless extremism which would only put the political initiative even further into the hands of the government. It was the final act of that tragedy which had begun with Peterloo — Thistlewood had publicly stated that revenge for the deaths at Peterloo was one of his objectives — and Shelley now saw the hopes for any immediate degree of democratic reform receding into an uncertain future. To Peacock he wrote: ‘I see with deep regret in today’s Papers the attempt to assassinate the Ministry. Every thing seems to conspire against Reform. — How Cobbett must laugh at the “resumption of gold payments”. I long to see him. I have a motto on a ring in Italian — “Il buon tempo verra” — There is a tide both in public & in private affairs, which awaits both men & nations.’
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For the rest of his life Shelley wore that ring, which promised the good times to come.

When Shelley wrote to Ollier to ask once more about
The Cenci
he made half-mocking inquiries. ‘I hope you are not implicated in the late plot. — Not having heard from Hunt, I am afraid that he at least has something to do with it. — It is well known since the time of Jaffier that a conspirator has no time — to think about his friends.’ It was a slightly bitter jest — that Hunt, who would not even publish political poems, might have involved himself in a political conspiracy was not exactly likely.
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It was only at the beginning of April that Shelley finally received letters from Hunt and Bessy Kent explaining that the silence of three months’ duration was due to financial ‘torments’. But this still did not explain or excuse Hunt’s total failure to react to Shelley’s stream of contributions during the autumn and winter, and Shelley asked pointedly after
The Cenci
, adding: ‘I don’t remember if I acknowledged the receipt of [your] “Robin Hood” — no more did you of “Peter Bell”. There’s tit for tat! . . . Then on my side is the letter to Carlile, in which I must tell you I was considerably interested.’
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Shelley was no longer talking of coming to England; instead he returned to the old invitation for Hunt to come to Italy. Two weeks later, on 20 April, he also issued an invitation to Hogg with whom he had not corresponded for over a year. He wanted Hogg to come for the summer and to stay until the beginning
of the law term in November. He was obviously serious, discussing the best mode of travel which was by coach to Marseilles, and then by boat to Livorno. He nostalgically recalled old friends. ‘Do you ever see the Boinvilles now? Or Newton? If so, tell them, especially Mrs Boinville, that I have not forgotten them. I wonder none of them stray to this Elysian climate, and, like the sailors of Ulysses, eat the lotus and remain as I have done.’
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When Hogg eventually replied from Garden Court, it was to say that the coronation prevented such a visit for that year, ‘though I should like to see Percy Shelley the younger, and to steal behind some laurel bush where you are singing shrilly like a king; but that cannot be’.
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A third invitation sent in April, and the only one that bore fruit, was a repetition of Shelley’s demand that Tom Medwin should move south from Geneva. He had now heard that Medwin was living with a brother-officer, Edward Williams, who like him was retired from the army in India on half pay. Shelley extended the invitation to Williams, and to his beautiful wife Jane with faintly ribald good humour. ‘I hope, if they come to Italy, I may see the lovely lady & your friend. — Though I have never had the ague, I have found these sort of beings, especially the former, of infinite service in the maladies to which I am subject . . . . Forgive me joking on what all poets ought to consider a sacred subject.’ But even Medwin and the Williamses did not come for several months.

In the new spacious apartments at the Casa Frassi, Shelley had at last established a completely private study for himself, which he had been missing ever since he left the airy sunlit cell at Villa Valsovano. He already had on hand the outline of his ‘octavo on reform’, and a scattered collection of political lyrics left over from the autumn. The news of Cato Street had been balanced at the beginning of April by unexpected good tidings of a successful insurrection of republicans in Madrid, and the proclamation of the liberal constitution of 1812 throughout the Spanish peninsula. The motto on his ring seemed true, and Shelley half thought of going to Madrid for the winter.
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Mary eagerly expressed both their feelings: ‘The inquisition is abolished — The dungeons opened & the Patriots pouring out — This is good. I should like to be in Madrid now.’
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The talk was animated at Casa Silva.

The political news helped to steady his attention. What little writing Shelley had already produced at Pisa during March and April was spoilt by diffuseness and marked by an extreme but aimless violence of language and metaphor. Partly this was a reaction from the intense creative period of the previous three months. His powers now seemed to be turning over too fast, without properly engaging with solid or deeply felt subject-matter. The language seemed to expend energies of disgust and hatred on itself until it was performing an almost
purgative, therapeutic function. In ‘The Sensitive Plant’, a poem traditionally associated with Shelley’s first impressions of Lady Mountcashell, the autumnal and winter imagery reaches a peculiar pitch of ugliness and horror.

And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,

Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,

Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,

Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.

And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould

Started like mist from the wet ground cold;

Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead

With a spirit of growth had been animated!

Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,

Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,

And at its outlet flags huge as stakes

Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes. . . .

For Winter came: the wind was his whip:

One choppy finger was on his lip:

He had torn the cataracts from the hills

And they clanked at his girdle like manacles
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In these verses, Shelley felt that Spring was indeed far behind, and they contain much of the personal anger, revulsion and despair that he refused to acknowledge or give way to in his letters.

Another lengthy but unfinished poem, dated in April, was an even more grotesque and shapeless piece of writing, ‘A Vision of the Sea’. It describes a tempest in which a boat — for a perhaps autobiographical reason carrying wild tigers, together with the familiar figure of a mother with child at breast — is wrecked and overwhelmed. The stormy sea is inhabited by sea-snakes and sharks. The whole fragment reads like a piece of ‘automatic’ or dream writing. Vaguely one can distinguish familiar shapes, like Henry Reveley’s steam-boat used as image to describe a tiger and a sea monster fighting in the foam:

the whirl and the splash

As of some hideous engine whose brazen teeth smash

The thin winds and soft waves into thunder; the screams

And hissings crawl fast o’er the smooth ocean-streams,

Each sound like a centipede.
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The painful and empty brilliance of this excruciated writing was perhaps partly symptomatic of the kind of ‘bad nervous attacks’ which Mary noted briefly in her journal and letters during these weeks.
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These probably took the form of hysterical outbreaks, usually preceded by particularly bad and vivid nightmares, of the kind that Mary much later described in detail in 1822; or the sort of sudden overwhelming nervous seizures which Shelley himself alluded to during his work on the ‘Catalogue of Dreams’ in 1815. There is no indication that they were epileptic; or even the kind of nephritic convulsions Thornton Hunt had once witnessed at Hampstead, but they give some indication of the hidden strains under which he was living.

Shelley slowly returned to the political theme, and picked up the thread of
A Philosophical Review of Reform
, continuing it into three chapters, which together form a substantial essay of 20,000 words. At the same time, he began to draft as a kind of parallel text, a formal ‘Ode to Liberty’. It began by celebrating the Spanish Rebellion, and then described the growth of Liberty throughout human history from the pre-Promethean period, to Athens, and finally to the revolutions in France, South America and Europe during Shelley’s own lifetime. The prose work and the poem cross at several points, and Shelley worked steadily at both for the rest of April and May. The essay was ready for a prospective publisher by 26 May, when Shelley again wrote to Hunt about it.
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The ode was sent to Ollier for inclusion in the
Prometheus
volume.

By a
philosophical
view, Shelley meant that he intended to study the world history of political change and revolution, and the corresponding evolution in men’s ideas concerning their own intellectual, social and religious freedom. He believed that the gradual emergence of Liberty in human thought and institutions was a recognizable ‘law’ of social development. This had nothing to do with a belief in material progress, nor did it discount the fact that terrible political ‘winters’ and cycles of tyrannical and bloody reaction frequently intervened. Shelley normally identified such periods of reaction with the triumph of imperialisms which included the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Spanish Slave Empire in South America and the Indies, the Turkish Empire and the European despotisms of the eighteenth century.

Nevertheless the gradual change to more and more liberated forms of life and government he believed to be a historical
necessity
, and as such capable of study and acceleration. This broad argument forms the substance of his first chapter, and it includes in its scope reference to China, India, Persia, North and South America, the Jews in Palestine, the Turks, Greece, Syria and Egypt; and France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The argument settled most sharply on Europe as the current focus of historical change, and within Europe, on England — ‘the particular object for the sake of which these general considerations have been
stated’. England, Shelley believed, was to be considered in this sense ‘at a crisis in its destiny’.
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In this first chapter Shelley also stated his belief in the connection — again, philosophically speaking, the
necessary
connection — between periods of national upheaval and social revolution, and periods of outstanding literary greatness. ‘For the most unfailing herald, or companion, or follower, of an universal employment of the sentiments of a nation to the production of beneficial change is poetry, meaning by poetry an intense and impassioned power of communicating intense and impassioned impressions respecting man and nature.’
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Shelley was not in sociological terms, very specific about the nature of this connection. He did not say that great literature actually produced great revolutions; or vice versa. He seemed rather to feel that the two ran a mysteriously parallel course — ‘herald, or companion, or follower’ — and that the common factor was not so much direct social causation or didactic intent, but a certain quality of imaginative power, as it were, ‘let loose’.

This was a controversial assertion, for there is clearly a case for arguing the opposite, that great periods of literature are only produced by periods of national stability which frequently occur in the very midst of an authoritarian or imperialist régime. Shelley cited as part of his historical case, the great dramatists and philosophers of fourth-century Athens; ‘Shakespeare and Lord Bacon and the great writers of the age of Elizabeth and James 1st’; the painters and poets of the Italian republics of the Lombard league
before
the domination of the Medicis in Florence; and finally the English poets and philosophers of his own age, which he defined as dating from the French Revolutionary period of the 1790s. There is too some evidence that Shelley felt the four books of the New Testament and some of the earliest Apostolic and Apocalyptic writings, all produced in Asia Minor during the first century AD, also served in this argument and ‘heralded’ the collapse of the Roman Empire.
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Altogether he makes this a powerful position, and it may subsequently be found developed in the work of later nineteenth-century theorists of literature and society, notably Arnold, Taine and Marx.